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sila: whoa!! that sure looks like fun! well done on participating and great job learning! hopefully you can…Hisham: Sure thing, Luke! Hope to see the birthday wish too if it’s possible.Luke: Hi, I would like to use one of ur photo to design a birthday wish for Sitiawan. I would put a credit …Hisham: Let’s just say “Canto Bight” was originally the name of some Tapani Sector noble’s pet duck.Edward: Or the city was named after the planet. Or they were both named after some forgotten dignitary. Weird…sila: glad that opah felt better though. hope she continues to feel healthy.sila: yay to a successful surgery! i hope you are recovering nicely. i’m imagining weird things with the s…Hisham: Thanks, chief. And yes I think your name is the longest we’ve ever had on here. Haha.

About

Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.

It's not much to look at, but there's something that barely looks like an orchid in the picture below. No, I don't know which species it is, only that it's yellow. And yes, there's a water-filled valley beneath it. This is my second piece using Painter Classic, scratched out with dry media mostly. Using the program is more difficult than I thought.

Oh, by the way, check out this amazing colour-based optical illusion. It's quite amazing, especially the third one.

The other cool stuff I bought the same day I bought the table is this Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. In fact, I've been wanting it for many years now that when I finally have it in my hands, I didn't have the heart to remove it from its box and plug it in for FOUR DAYS. This morning I finally did it.

After getting the tablet up and running with my computer, I proceeded to install the bundled Painter Classic software. When I finally ran the program, my blood went cold. All the colours were screwed up! It took me about 30 minutes before I decided to increase my monitor's setting from 16-bit to 32-bit colour.

Only then did I let out a sigh of relief. I grabbed the stylus, played around with the controls a bit; then tried playing with different brushes and tool on different layers; finally wiped the slate clean and proceeded to paint this:

My first Painter-made art ever. My technique is still way out there. It's gonna take some more practice to get myself up to speed with the new tablet and software. Ultimately, I believe that my work will go much smoother and faster on the computer.

Addendum: I just remembered that I had Open Canvas prepared for action in my computer. So, a mathematical equation came to mind. Graphire3 + Open Canvas + Hisham's Tired Imagination = ...

That's one of my favourite DC superhero from the late 80s and early 90s, Animal Man.

Apparently ABC has a birthday surprise for Irfan's 3rd birthday this year. They'll be airing the Lost second season opener on September 21st. Hooray! More answers to our questions already, like the fates of our intrepid (or suicidal) mariners Sawyer, Jin, Michael and (especially) Walt.

Last week, we printed out some of the prototype pages for the first ever Hishgraphics e-book. To be honest, prior to this I do have a fair amount of doubts about the project. In my mind, I estimated that perhaps this would have a 20-30% success when it's eventually released into the wild.

There are many reasons why I love the intarweb. One of them is free cool stuff you can get from various sites, and legal too. Baen Books is a publisher of science fiction books, and it has now jumped onto the freebie net goodies bandwagon by unleashing upon its readers the Baen Free Library.

Check out the free science fiction stories written by professional authors. You can read in several formats which is kind of cool. Cause if say, HTML format gives you an allergic reaction, you can always switch to RTF. I'm just gonna pick out which story to read. I'll go get my dice now.

Wha-? How? Sashed? What do you mean? How did it happen?! Should we tell someone?!?!

See the little diagonal banner with the link at the top, right hand corner of the page? That's a sash. I came across it while trawling the net and thought I'd try it on for size. Don't get used to it, it's just there for experimental purposes and won't be there indefinitely.

To savour the tale of how I discovered the code, how to reproduce it, how many Bothans died to bring us this code, and to see a screencap of the front page (in case the little diagonal banner with the link of top is banished from the land by the time you read this) check out my entry at Chris Curtis Dot Org.

So after drawing a dozen or so robots and a couple of cyborgs for a freelance client, I thought I'd take a break and draw a quick pencil sketch of this seaside landscape which real estate value would no doubt be way over my head should the location exist. I figure this would be a fantastic place to cook fried noodles. Anyway, enjoy.

Using whatever ingredients left in the fridge, I came up with this earlier today, took a picture of it, gobbled it all down, and now in my belly it will find a new definition of pain & suffering as it is slowly digested over a thousand years. Click on the above thumbnail for a larger image.

What could be more American than baseball and apple pie? Why would a Malaysian girl even give a hoot? Because baseball is Vin's obsession. (He likes apple pie too, and blasphemously, I don't, but that's a different story altogether). During the spring and summer months Vin eats, drinks, lives, and breathes baseball. During the off-season, he keeps track of the trades and developments in the Major Leagues. We started dating in August of 2000, and by the fall of 2001 (the first full baseball season, spring-summer of 2001), I could read a box score. And Vin and I had a long-distance relationship.

Many baseball widows would probably reprimand me for encouraging this obsession but (un)fortunately for me, baseball means more than just something Vin is unnaturally fixated on. We met at a baseball game. What? What was I, the least-interested-worst-possible-athletic person in the world doing at a baseball game?

In conjunction with the much anticipated second season of Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica last night, I will put to you the somewhat retarded question:

Isn't Tahmoh Penikett (Helo of BSG) a spitting image of Fear Factor (and dont forget Newsradio)'s Joe Rogan? I can't get the image of Helo creating a stun gun out of a garage door remote out of my mind... with Dave Foley and Andy Dick running past him in the background.

I've been a comic book reader ever since I can remember. One of the best spin offs from the DC Universe would be the DC Animated Universe, beginning with Batman: The Animated Series. The current series set in the same universe is the Justice League Unlimited, based on the Justice League of America comic book, where dozens of heroes pull together to keep Earth safe from evil from both within and without from their space station, the Watchtower. Sounds cheesy? Not if you watch it and catch the excellently written dialogue and tightly storyboarded animation that comes with it. JLU has become one of my favourite animated show ever. Here is a review of 3 of 4 of the Cadmus arc episodes, "Question Authority", "Flashpoint" and "Panic In The Sky.".